Sylvester Stallone Details Richard Gere Feud: ‘I’d Knock His Teeth Out’

Dan Clarendon October 4, 2026, 11:02 am

Sylvester Stallone at a 'Paradise Alley' wrap-up party in 1978, Richard Gere in a portrait circa 1979 — Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images, Keystone/Getty Images

What To Know

Sylvester Stallone recounts a longstanding feud with Richard Gere that began during auditions and filming of the 1974 movie The Lords of Flatbush, sparked by on-set tensions and physical altercations.
The conflict escalated to the point where Gere was fired from the film and replaced, with Stallone claiming Gere has disliked him ever since and blaming him for persistent rumors.
The animosity between the two actors resurfaced years later, nearly resulting in a physical confrontation at a party involving Princess Diana, as described in Elton John’s autobiography.

A couple of years before throwing punches in Rocky, Sylvester Stallone was ready to duke it out with Richard Gere on the set of the 1974 comedy film The Lords of Flatbush.

Stallone details the origin of his years-long feud with Gere in his new memoir, The Steps, saying that their discord began as they auditioned for the film alongside Robert De Niro, per Entertainment Weekly.

“I remember everything went pretty well initially with me and De Niro,” Stallone recalled in the memoir. “We were trying to outtalk each other. I enjoyed improvisation and the process of ad-libbing. Then the improvs with Richard Gere went bad, when Gere grabbed my T-shirt and his fingernails dug into my skin. I told him to back off, but he did it again on the second take. He couldn’t have known, but Gere had begun to stir the emotional cauldron inside me.”

He went on: “I turned to [co-director] Stephen Verona and asked him, ‘Is it okay if I ad-lib here and react the way I would actually react if someone did that to me in real life?’” he recalled. “‘What would you do?’ ‘Do? I’d knock his teeth out.’ ‘Please don’t.’”

Stallone’s tension with Gere reached a breaking point one day on set when the actors were taking their lunch break in a parked car, and the future Pretty Woman actor spilled “a stream of chicken grease” onto Stallone’s leg.

“I elbowed him across the chest, got out of the car, came around to his side, and pulled him out of the back seat. ‘Hey, man, I don’t want to get physical,’ Gere said in a thin voice. ‘Too late…’” the Rambo star wrote. “Stephen Verona put himself in front of Gere. It was clear to everyone that this wasn’t working. One of us had to go.”

Verona fired Gere and replaced him with Perry King. De Niro eventually left the project, too, and his role went to Paul Mace.

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“Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me,” Stallone told Ain’t It Cool News in 2006. “He even thinks I’m the individual responsible for the gerbil rumor. Not true… but that’s the rumor.”

Stallone and Gere also nearly came to blows in the mid-1990s, when Stallone was infuriated to see Gere talking with Princess Diana at a house party, according to Elton John’s autobiography, Me, per the Daily Mail. Stallone had come “with the express intention of picking her up,” the singer recalled. David Furnish, John’s future husband, then discovered Stallone and Gere “in the corridor, squaring up to each other, apparently about to settle their differences over Diana by having a fist-fight,” John added.